Daniel sent us this one — and I'll say upfront, it's not a gentle prompt. He's asking us to imagine the UN simply... And he's coming from a place of real frustration: the hypocrisy of human rights abusers sitting in judgment of Israel, the antisemitism of officials like Francesca Albanese getting a pass, the endless reports, the inability to enforce anything. His question is practical: how would the world actually function without the UN? What fringe benefits might we see from leaving the institution in the history books?
The timing on this is almost too perfect. There's a piece in PassBlue from April — just a couple months ago — looking at what they're calling the UN80 reform initiative. The UN turned 80 last October, and the official reform plan that's emerged is being described by critics as rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. The core complaint is that it avoids structural change entirely — it's cosmetic. So Daniel's not asking this in a vacuum. The institution itself is having this conversation, and by most accounts, it's failing it.
Which is why I want to frame this episode differently than a typical "is the UN good or bad" debate. Those are boring. Everyone's already picked a side. What Daniel's really asking is a systems question: if you pulled this institution out of the global architecture tomorrow, what would actually break? What would get absorbed by other actors? And what would anyone genuinely miss?
A stress test.
A stress test. No moral judgment — or at least, we'll try to bracket the moral judgment and just map the functions. Because here's the thing: the UN is already shrinking. It's not some static monolith we'd be toppling. It's been losing mass for years.
Right — and this is where the numbers get concrete. Foreign Policy ran a piece in August of last year that laid out the fiscal crisis in detail. The United States is one point five billion dollars in arrears to the UN regular budget. That's not a rounding error. That's real money that forces real cuts. The organization is cutting fifteen percent of its staff.
That's not trimming around the edges.
It's not. And if you look at peacekeeping — which is the most visible thing the UN does — the numbers tell the same story. According to a piece in EJILTalk, UN peacekeeping has dropped from a hundred and twenty thousand troops in 2015 to seventy-two thousand in 2025. That's a forty percent reduction in a decade. These missions aren't scaling up to meet demand — they're being dismantled.
The thought experiment Daniel's proposing isn't "what if we suddenly delete a thriving institution." It's "what if we accelerate a trend that's already underway." The UN is hollowing out. The question is whether formal dissolution clarifies that process or creates chaos — and for whom.
That's what we want to trace through this episode. We're going to map the UN's actual operational footprint — not the rhetoric, not the symbolism, but the concrete functions. Peacekeeping, humanitarian coordination, international law, norm-setting. Then we'll ask: which of these are irreplaceable, and which are already being done better by regional organizations, private actors, or ad-hoc coalitions?
We'll also take Daniel's question about fringe benefits seriously. If the UN vanished, what would actually improve? What dysfunctions would disappear along with the institution? And we'll weigh those against the genuine losses — because there would be losses, and it's worth being honest about what they are.
The one thing I want to flag before we dive in — and this is something the PassBlue piece really drives home — is that the UN80 reform process is the test case happening right now. If it fails, and the early signals suggest it will, then the question Daniel's asking stops being hypothetical. The hollowing out accelerates, and the real power shifts permanently to the G20, to regional blocs, to ad-hoc arrangements that don't bother with Security Council resolutions at all.
That's the frame. No grand pronouncements about global governance. Just a clear-eyed look at what the UN actually does, what would fill the gaps if it stopped, and whether we'd notice the difference in a week, a month, or a year. Let's get into it.
Let's start with the paralysis, because it's the most visible failure. The Security Council was designed to prevent great-power war — that was the whole point. And right now, the two biggest conflicts of this decade, Ukraine and Gaza, are happening in full view of a body that cannot act. Russia holds a veto on Ukraine. The US holds a veto on anything that constrains Israel. The mechanism is frozen by design.
It's not a bug, it's the architecture. The veto was built in precisely so the major powers would never be bound by a majority they disagreed with. Which worked, in the sense that we avoided World War Three. But it also means the Council can't address any conflict where a permanent member has a stake.
That's not theoretical. That's every major conflict right now. So you have this surreal situation where the body charged with maintaining international peace and security issues statements, holds meetings, and changes precisely nothing on the ground.
Which brings us to the second failure, and this one's less about design and more about decay. The money is running out. Foreign Policy reported the US is one point five billion dollars in arrears. The organization is cutting fifteen percent of its staff. That's not a temporary shortfall — that's an existential signal.
The peacekeeping numbers tell the same story from the operational side. EJILTalk tracked this: a hundred and twenty thousand troops in 2015, down to seventy-two thousand in 2025. Forty percent gone. And it's not because the world got more peaceful. These missions are being withdrawn because the political will and the funding aren't there.
The UN isn't just failing to act — it's physically shrinking while the demand for what it theoretically does is increasing. That's a different problem than "the Security Council is gridlocked." That's institutional atrophy.
Then there's the credibility problem. Daniel mentioned Francesca Albanese — she's the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine, and she's made multiple statements that have been widely condemned as antisemitic, including comparisons of Israel to Nazi Germany. This isn't a fringe official. This is someone appointed by the Human Rights Council.
Speaking of which — the Human Rights Council currently includes Libya, China, Cuba, and Eritrea. These are countries with documented, systematic human rights abuses, and they sit in judgment of Israel. You don't need to be a partisan to see the absurdity. The structure is inverted.
When Daniel says the institution is corrupt, not just ineffective, this is what he's pointing at. It's not that the UN fails to do good things. It's that it actively provides cover for bad actors while targeting democracies. That's worse than useless.
That's the question we need to hold through the rest of this. Not "is the UN bad?" but "if you removed it, which of these dysfunctions vanish, and which functions would someone else have to pick up?" Because those are two different lists, and they don't overlap neatly.
Let's map what actually vanishes. The UN runs eleven peacekeeping missions with about seventy-two thousand troops. That's down from a hundred and twenty thousand in 2015 — EJILTalk documented this dismantlement in detail. You also lose OCHA, the humanitarian coordination arm. You lose WFP and UNICEF's logistics backbone — the warehouses, the supply chains, the last-mile delivery networks in places no private actor wants to operate. You lose the framework bodies: UNCLOS for maritime law, the Geneva Conventions machinery, the treaty depositories. And you lose the norm-setting apparatus — the SDGs, the human rights treaty bodies, the whole report-generating ecosystem.
The paper factory. Ten thousand plus reports a year.
Ten thousand plus. And the 2024 Summit of the Future produced a forty-two-page Pact for the Future that Secretary-General Guterres himself said was not enough. That's almost a perfect case study: a summit designed to reshape global governance produces a document its own author disowns before the ink is dry.
The footprint sounds enormous until you ask which of these functions are already being done elsewhere — and done better. The AU runs peacekeeping in Somalia. The EU has its Battlegroups, however imperfect. The Gates Foundation outspends the WHO on global health — and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria was created outside the WHO entirely and has saved more than fifty million lives. That's not a pilot program. That's a replacement institution.
It's a model worth studying because it sidesteps the UN's structural problems. No Security Council vetoes. No Human Rights Council membership fights. Just a focused mandate, donor accountability, and measurable outcomes. Fifty million lives is not a rounding error.
The JCPOA — the Iran nuclear deal — was negotiated by the P5 plus one outside the Security Council framework. The actual diplomacy happened in ad-hoc rooms, not under the UN gavel. The Council ratified it after the fact, but the deal didn't need the UN to exist.
Which brings us to peacekeeping, because that's where the hollowing out is most visible. MINUSMA in Mali was dismantled in 2023. The MINUSCA mission in the Central African Republic has been drawing down. And what fills the vacuum isn't another UN mission — it's Wagner Group, private military contractors, or nothing at all. The security function isn't being transferred. It's being abandoned.
The UN's most visible operational role — blue helmets on the ground — is shrinking, and the replacement isn't a better multilateral force. It's mercenaries or a vacuum. That's worth sitting with, because it complicates the "just dissolve it" case.
But it also tells you something about the trajectory. The UN isn't being pushed out by a competitor. It's withdrawing because the political will to fund and authorize these missions is evaporating. The US pays twenty-two percent of the regular budget and twenty-seven percent of peacekeeping. When the largest funder is one point five billion in arrears, the missions don't get replaced — they just end.
The COVID response is the case study that captures both sides of this. The WHO's early response was a failure — slow to declare the emergency, slow on guidance, outmaneuvered by the virus. But COVAX, the vaccine distribution mechanism, was a partial success. It got doses to places the market wouldn't have served. The coordination function was necessary. The execution was deeply flawed. Both things are true.
That's the pattern across the UN system. The humanitarian logistics backbone — the UNHRD warehouses, the OCHA coordination hubs — that's the function that would be missed if the institution vanished tomorrow. Nobody else runs prepositioned emergency stockpiles at that scale. The Red Cross and Red Crescent do some of it. Bilateral aid does some. But the coordination layer that prevents total chaos in a Syria or a Yemen — that's a real loss.
Which is different from saying the UN is irreplaceable. It's saying that one specific function — humanitarian logistics coordination — would need a deliberate successor. Everything else on the list is already duplicated, bypassed, or outcompeted.
The peacekeeping drawdown tells us something else too. The missions that are ending aren't the ones that succeeded. They're the ones where the host country said "leave." Mali kicked MINUSMA out. The UN didn't declare victory and go home. It was expelled. That's not a transition to peace. That's a rejection of the model.
When defenders say "without the UN, who would keep the peace?" — the answer in Mali is: Wagner, or nobody. The UN wasn't keeping it either, but at least there was a flag. Now there's neither a flag nor peace. That's the actual tradeoff, not the rhetorical one.
That's why Daniel's question is more pragmatic than it sounds. If the functions are already migrating elsewhere — regional organizations, private foundations, ad-hoc coalitions — then dissolution isn't creation of a vacuum. It's recognition of one that already exists. The question is whether formalizing it makes things better or worse.
The Global Fund is the exhibit A for "better." Focused mandate, no Security Council politics, measurable outcomes, fifty million lives saved. If you were designing a replacement for the WHO's disease-fighting function from scratch, you'd build something that looks a lot more like the Global Fund than the WHO.
Let's pick up the other side of this. Daniel asked about fringe benefits — what actually gets better if the UN disappears. And there's a real list here.
Start with the Human Rights Council. Right now Libya, China, Cuba, and Eritrea sit on a body whose primary function — I mean, the thing it does most energetically — is condemn Israel. You have Eritrea, which doesn't even hold elections, passing judgment on the only democracy in the Middle East. The Council doesn't just fail to protect human rights. It provides cover. Authoritarian regimes get to say "we're on the Human Rights Council" while they jail dissidents. That cover vanishes with the institution.
It's not a one-off. It's structural. The Council's membership is allocated by regional blocs, so you get slates where the worst actors run unopposed. There's no qualification test. You just need your regional group to nominate you. The TRT World piece on UN reform framed this as institutional capture — the bodies designed to uphold standards get captured by the very states that violate them.
Institutional capture is exactly right. And it extends to UNESCO, which has spent decades passing resolutions that single out Israel on cultural heritage issues while ignoring countries that are actively destroying heritage sites. The pattern is consistent: the UN's human rights and cultural bodies don't just fail to protect the values they claim to uphold — they invert them.
Then there's UNRWA. This is the agency created specifically for Palestinian refugees, and it's the only UN refugee agency dedicated to a single population. Every other refugee group in the world falls under UNHCR. UNRWA has existed for over seventy-five years, and the refugee issue is no closer to resolution. The agency's existence effectively perpetuates the problem — it defines refugee status as hereditary, which means the number of "refugees" grows every year regardless of whether anyone is actually displaced. No other refugee population works this way.
If UNRWA vanished tomorrow, the Palestinian refugee question wouldn't be solved overnight. But the perverse incentive to keep it unresolved — because resolution would eliminate the agency's reason for existing — that incentive disappears. You'd have to fold the population into UNHCR's normal framework, which doesn't treat refugee status as something you inherit.
Then there's the money. The US pays twenty-two percent of the regular UN budget and twenty-seven percent of peacekeeping. That's roughly three billion dollars a year, give or take, going into a system where the Human Rights Council is chaired by abusers and the Security Council can't act on the biggest conflicts. The return on that investment is, to put it generously, minimal.
The fringe benefits Daniel's asking about are real. You stop funding a Human Rights Council that provides cover for dictators. You stop subsidizing an agency that perpetuates a refugee crisis. You stop paying for a Security Council that can't secure anything. That money — three billion a year — doesn't vanish. It gets redirected.
Which brings us to the coordination vacuum, because this is where I pump the brakes. The one thing the UN does that would be hard to replace overnight is the humanitarian logistics backbone. The UNHRD warehouses — that's the Humanitarian Response Depot network — preposition emergency supplies in strategic locations worldwide. OCHA coordinates who goes where after a disaster so you don't have twelve NGOs all delivering blankets to the same village while another village gets nothing.
Even that's already shifting. Turkey coordinates cross-border aid into Syria. The UAE runs coordination in Yemen. Bilateral aid increasingly bypasses UN channels entirely. The model is fragmenting, and the fragments work.
They work in specific contexts with willing host governments. The question is whether they'd work in a sudden-onset crisis where no single country is taking the lead. The UN's coordination function is most valuable when nobody wants to own the problem. That's the gap I don't see an obvious replacement for.
But then look at the legal framework question. People assume dissolving the UN would blow up international law. It wouldn't. UNCLOS, the Geneva Conventions, the Genocide Convention — these are standalone treaties. They don't depend on the UN existing. The International Court of Justice would need a new registry, but cases would shift to arbitration, which is already how most international disputes get resolved.
The real loss is the codification function. If you want a new treaty on, say, AI governance or space mining, there's no obvious forum to negotiate it. The JCPOA shows great-power diplomacy works outside the Security Council — the P5 plus one negotiated the Iran deal in ad-hoc rooms, and the Council just stamped it afterward. But that model works for deals among major powers. It doesn't work for broad multilateral treaties where you need buy-in from a hundred and ninety countries.
The ledger looks like this. On the benefit side: no more Human Rights Council laundering reputations, no more UNRWA perpetuating a seventy-five-year impasse, no more UNESCO singling out Israel, three billion dollars a year freed up, and an end to the fiction that Security Council resolutions matter. On the loss side: the humanitarian logistics backbone would need a deliberate successor, and the treaty-negotiation forum doesn't have an obvious replacement.
What's striking is how asymmetric that ledger is. The benefits are about ending active harms. The losses are about replacing useful but already-declining functions. The UN isn't primarily failing by absence. It's failing by presence — by doing the wrong things, not just failing to do the right ones.
Which is Daniel's core argument, really. An ineffective institution is tolerable. An institution that actively provides cover for the worst actors while targeting democracies — that's worse than useless. That's corrosive.
Where does this actually land? Because dissolution isn't the most likely outcome. The most realistic scenario is what we're already watching — hollowing out. The UN keeps existing as a talking shop, but the real power keeps migrating to regional blocs, ad-hoc coalitions, and private actors. The AU handles African security. The EU does its own thing. ASEAN operates in Southeast Asia. The UN80 reform process is the test of whether that trajectory can be reversed.
By most accounts, it can't. PassBlue called UN80 the wrong answer to the right question. The Global Observatory ran a piece in April of last year arguing the world is changing too fast for the current structure to keep up. If UN80 fails — and the early signals suggest it will — then watch for the US to start pushing a G20-plus model that bypasses the Security Council entirely.
Which would formalize what's already happening informally. The G20 already handles financial crisis response. The G7 coordinates on sanctions. The JCPOA showed you can do nuclear diplomacy without the Council. The pieces are all there.
For listeners who want to track this, PassBlue and the Global Observatory are where the honest UN80 coverage lives. Not the official press releases. The question to watch is whether the UN can restructure to stay relevant, or whether it doubles down on the same structures while the world moves past them.
Here's the practical takeaway I keep coming back to. The UN's most valuable function is the one nobody talks about in the big reform debates. It's not the Security Council. It's not the General Assembly speeches. It's the logistics backbone — the UNHRD warehouses, the OCHA coordination hubs that prevent humanitarian response from becoming total chaos after a disaster. If you care about humanitarian access, that's the function you'd fight to preserve in any successor system.
Everything else — the talking, the resolutions, the ten thousand reports, the Pact for the Future that its own author disowned — is already being done better elsewhere. The Global Fund model works. Regional blocs work. Ad-hoc coalitions work. The one thing that doesn't have an obvious replacement is the prepositioned supplies and the coordination layer that kicks in when nobody wants to own the problem.
Which means the framework for thinking about this isn't "keep or dissolve." It's "which specific functions matter, and who should run them." Evaluate each piece independently. The Human Rights Council is actively harmful. The logistics backbone is valuable. UNRWA perpetuates what it claims to solve. The treaty depositories are useful but replaceable. There's no single answer because there's no single institution — it's thirty-plus agencies with wildly different track records.
That's the framework Daniel's prompt points toward, whether or not he'd use these words. Don't defend the UN as a blob. Don't attack it as a blob. Look at the functions. Keep what works, kill what harms, and build deliberate replacements for the gaps. The hollowing out is already doing the first two. It's the third one — the deliberate replacements — that nobody's seriously planning for.
Here's the open question I keep coming back to. If the UN dissolved tomorrow — not phased out, not reformed, just gone — would anyone notice in a week? I think the answer reveals more than any report could.
The logistics backbone would be missed inside a week. The first time a cyclone hits Bangladesh or fighting spikes in Sudan and there's no OCHA coordination hub routing supplies, you'd feel it immediately. People would die because the prepositioned stockpiles weren't there and nobody knew who was supposed to go where.
The Security Council resolutions? The General Assembly votes? The ten thousand reports? I don't think anyone would notice for months. The things the UN spends most of its political energy on are the things the world would miss least.
Which is a brutal verdict on where the institution has put its weight. The PassBlue piece on UN80 made this point sideways — the reform plan focuses on process tweaks because tackling the actual dysfunction would require admitting the structure is wrong. And nobody inside the system is willing to say that out loud.
Here's the provocation I want to leave on the table. The UN was designed to prevent World War Three. It succeeded at that —. The great powers never went to direct war. But the threats we're facing now are climate collapse, pandemics, and AI governance. Is an institution built for 1945 the right tool for those problems?
The UN80 reform process is the answer to that question — and so far, the answer is no. If the institution can't restructure to address the actual threats of the current era, then it's not a solution. It's a monument. And monuments don't solve problems.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Thanks to Hilbert Flumingtop for producing.
If you want more episodes like this one, find us at my weird prompts dot com or wherever you get your podcasts.
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